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Recontextualizing YouTube: From Macro–Micro to Mass-Mediated Communicative Repertoires aeq_1170

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BETSY RYMES University of Pennsylvania In this article, I deconstruct the macro–micro dichotomy by arguing that the very same mass-media messages that appear culturally homogenizing (like catchy tunes and phrases) also invite creative recontextualizations (Bauman and Briggs 1990). Moreover, the more widely circulated and mass-produced a message is, the more highly diverse the interactions with it will be. This is because these widely circulating forms become incorporated into individuals’ communicative repertoires (Rymes 2010), to be deployed in indeterminate variation. I illustrate this point by first looking at the meteoric rise of the pop artist “Soulja Boy” and his hit, “Crank Dat.” Following the illustration of the circulation and recontextualization of Soulja Boy’s hit, I apply this method of analysis to a less seemingly trivial mass-mediated movement—Obama’s first presidential campaign. By tracing the pathway of semiotic forms as recontextualized and circulated via YouTube, I demonstrate an empirical approach for studying how widely circulating cultural emblems become incorporated into individual-level communicative repertoires. This approach is important to scholars of Anthropology and Education because, unlike micro–macro approaches, which often rely on a priori demographic or interactional categories for analysis, a repertoire approach provides a nonessentializing way of investigating difference in and out of classrooms. [communicative repertoire, popular culture, discourse analysis, mass media] In 1964, Herbert Marcuse wrote One-Dimensional Man. He argued that “macro” level forces like mass media and marketing were functioning in ways analogous to a totalitarian regime, homogenizing peoples’ tastes and desires. In this consumer regime, the deluded consumers were losing any ability for critique. This is a perspective many people still voice today. We are all sold out—all consumed by our need to consume, the means of production out of our hands, so much so that we lack any critical distance or the ability to be original. We can only buy mass-produced goods that tell us who to be and how to act. Then, in 1970, Alastair MacIntyre performed an act Marcuse thought to be impossible—he wrote a thoughtful critique of One-Dimensional Man. MacIntyre wondered: If we really are all so lost because of totalitarian consumerism, how is it that Marcuse was even able to write his book? Why isn’t he equally lost? If the market is truly so deadening, how could Marcuse imagine that anyone would ever read or understand One-Dimensional Man? Obviously, Marcuse leaned to “macro” level explanations. By assuming all individual interactions had been subsumed by some grand controlling mass-mediated culture, he neglected to account for the indeterminate variation in even the most highly standardized media encounter. Like any instance of human engagement with the symbolic world, marketing of goods entails a communicative event in which an active consumer must enter into some kind of interaction with those products. This interaction could be a mindless one (as Marcuse presumed most peoples’ interactions to be). Or, it could be an elite, educated, and critical one (as he seems to have presumed his own relationship with consumer goods to be). Or, it could be ironic, playful, mocking, subverting, culturejamming, faux culture-jamming, and so forth. Most importantly, individual responses are necessarily selective of infinite semiotic features within a mass-mediated encounter. Any widely circulating, mass-mediated performance is a multimodal collectivity—it may include catchy phrases, like “Born in the USA” or “Keep yo head up,” but also Yankee’s Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 43, Issue 2, pp. 214–227, ISSN 0161-7761, online ISSN 1548-1492. © 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI:10.1111/j.1548-1492.2012.01170.x.

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caps, gold lamé push-up bras, aviator glasses, huge diamond jewelry, a melody, a beat, and a set of rhymes. Individuals selectively incorporate these widely circulating semiotic elements into locally relevant communicative repertoires (Rymes 2010), to fit with their own, local communicative goals. In this article, I illustrate this repertoire approach, deconstructing the macro–micro dichotomy by arguing that the very same mass-media infrastructures that worry those cultural critics like Marcuse also necessitate creative recontextualizations (Baumann and Briggs 1990) in individuals’ communicative repertoires (Rymes 2010). Although a single event–level act of recontextualization (e.g., humming a song-lyric to oneself) does not necessarily endure as part of a shared local repertoire, this article illustrates how, over time, select recontextualizations become recognized as having a certain common communicative value within a social grouping. The word “def” or a Soulja Boy dance step, for example, may become a repertoire element that functions differently in different social groups. So, because the same semiotic elements take on varied and localized communicative functions, no matter how massively produced and ubiquitously distributed a product is—and no matter the degree of corporate sponsorship—any text contains repertoire elements that are selected for differently by different groups. As such, the more widely circulated and mass produced a message is, the more highly diverse the interactions with it will be. For an anthropologist of education, there are practical, even ethical (not simply theoretical) reasons for going beyond “micro–macro,” and reasons directly relevant to education. Microapproaches have, traditionally, been useful as a means to avoid the potentially essentializing tendencies of “macro” conceptualizations that overgeneralize what certain demographic groups do or think (potentially leading to misunderstandings, prejudice, or unfair discrimination). However, as Wortham’s introduction points out, “micro,” eventlevel accounts can also ignore the macrolevel generalizations that are crucial to meaning making in individual encounters. Human beings count on generalizations (drawn from experiences across stretches of time and space) to make sense of actors in even the most fleeting social interactions. Teachers call on such generalizations to make sense of student behavior every day. These days, however, as educational spaces become even more multilingual and super diverse, and increasingly permeated by digital technologies that reach far outside the classroom, finding uniform explanations for behavior based on either “macro-level” cultural generalizations or isolated event-level analyses can be highly problematic. As Blommaert (2010) has pointed out, in this age of globalization and super diversity we just do not know anymore (if we ever did) what generalizations certain semiotic signs—skin color, age, clothing, linguistic code—can be linked to. Moreover, as linguistic anthropologists of education, we have a dedication to the empirical that eschews such overgeneralization. To this end, in this article, I provide a new lens for understanding difference in and out of the classroom by illustrating an empirical means for tracing the relationship between widely circulating messages and their infinitely varied deployment by individuals via the digital medium of YouTube. I demonstrate this process by examining how widely circulating semiotic forms (a song, a dance, or a phrase like, “Yes We Can!”) are taken up by individuals as part of their communicative repertoire (Rymes 2010) and redeployed in hybrid combinations with relevant repertoire elements common to that individual’s social milieu. This approach is important to scholars of Anthropology and Education because, unlike micro–macro approaches, which often rely on a priori demographic categories for analysis,1 a repertoire approach provides a nonessentializing way of investigating difference in and out of classrooms. I illustrate this point by first looking at a phenomenon arguably categorized as a “hip hop artist” named Soulja Boy and the meteoric rise of his hit, “Crank Dat.” By looking at how this song has been recontextualized in a fantastic diversity of forms, I want to

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illustrate that mass media afford both homogenization and infinite recontextualization. Suburban elementary school boys, Harry Potter fans, even MIT professors and their students know this song. But they all know it very differently. And, rather than being mindlessly numbed by it, each group, to different degrees, becomes drawn to select recontextualizations that that group recognizes as having a certain common communicative value. In this way, recontextualized elements of the Soulja Boy performance become part of locally functional communicative repertoires. Following this illustration of the circulation and recontextualization of Soulja Boy’s hit, I’ll apply this method of analysis to a less seemingly trivial mass-mediated movement— Obama’s presidential campaign. Both these phenomena illustrate a similar process, and this article, ultimately, illustrates a method for understanding Internet-circulated mass media messages and their effects. In addition, this approach points to an empirical means to go beyond micro–macro and agency–emergence dichotomies by tracing the function of widely circulating mass-mediated semiotic forms as part of individuals’ communicative repertoires. First, some words on recontextualization and repertoire. Recontexualization and Communicative Repertoire By communicative repertoire, I mean the collection of ways individuals use language and other means of communication (gestures, dress, posture, accessories) to function effectively in the multiple communities in which they participate (Rymes 2010). The sociolinguist, John Gumperz (1964, 1965), originally adopted a repertoire approach to address the massive linguistic variety within India. Later, Dell Hymes expanded the repertoire concept to include aspects of interaction that extend beyond multilingualism to include features like event structure and normative routines. Here, I further expand the term to include widely circulating mass-mediated forms like a YouTube-circulated dance step, a cereal brand name like Fruit Loops, or a memorable phrase (Yes we can!). So, an individual’s communicative repertoire includes not only linguistic elements (and, often, multiple languages—¡sí se puede!) but also mass-mediated cultural elements, circulated, often, via viral Internet sources like videos found on YouTube. Like those individuals Gumperz studied, who drew on multiple languages to make their way through communicatively complex marketplace negotiations, students today draw on multiple communicative repertoire elements—both multiple languages and myriad mass-mediated semiotic forms—as they go through their daily routine performing relevant and functional identities. These repertoire elements are highly recontextualizable bits—because they are often catchy, memorable, or dramatic. Like poetic features such as rhyme or parallelism originally noted as highly recontextualizable by Bauman and Briggs (1990) and Silverstein and Urban (1996), Internet phenomena tend to become more widely circulated (and “go viral”) when they have salient features that are recognized when reproduced in a new context. However, when deployed in new contexts as part of an individual’s unique communicative repertoire, these recontextualized bits also develop new, highly localized, functionality. The significance of a single, event-level recontextualization of a viral video feature is impossible to analyze. It could be as potentially meaningless as tapping a rhythm aimlessly on one’s office desk. But, when this recontextualization is recognizable by others (as evidenced by, e.g., shared opinions about YouTube videos, or exchanged glances across a classroom), it is functioning as part of an individual’s locally functional communicative repertoire. In schools, for example, a certain gesture, phrase, or pattern of dress, recontextualized in a classroom interaction, can affect how a child participates in that setting and who count as legitimate interlocutors. The child who calls out the name of a Pokémon character in

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class, for example, selects his peers, specifically those who are Pokémon fans, as his primary interlocutors (Rymes 2004). Suddenly the teacher is excluded from the talk in her own classroom. Similarly, everyday, we make choices about whom we interact with and how we interact with them based on momentary mentions or enactments of widely circulating emblems of identity. When people make popular cultural references they automatically select a set of listeners for their talk. Mention the (best-selling!) author Jonathan Franzen and some adults will perk up, others will look blank. In this way, even simple references to widely circulating media icons are part of one’s communicative repertoire. Such widely circulating, mass-mediated semiotic forms become recontextualized in an individual’s communicative repertoire in special performances (like YouTube videos) and in everyday interaction. The most obvious way people use mass media as a repertoire element is through explicit reference. This is exemplified above, when kids mention “Pokémon” or an adult talks about “Jonathan Franzen.” A second way we deploy mass media as part of our repertoire is through implicit enactment, as when we (to varying degrees of awareness) try to act like or emulate the actions or personas of widely circulating types. Someone might, for example, try to look like a Pokémon character, or get their hair cut like Justin Bieber. This kind of creative emulation has been documented (in its more conscious instantiations) by Henry Jenkins and others in their studies of fan culture (Jenkins 1992, 2006). But, probably the most common and least obvious way that widely circulating semiotic forms become incorporated into one’s repertoire is in disparate hybrid combinations, as will be illustrated in this article. In what follows, I illustrate several examples of such disparate hybrid combinations of repertoire elements by analyzing YouTube variations of viral videos. In these variations, elements of YouTube performances become recontextualized in combination with other widely circulating mass-mediated semiotic forms, as part of an individual’s communicative repertoire. My goal is to illustrate an empirical methodology for understanding how mass-mediated elements function in locally functional ways within individuals’ repertoires. Note on Methodology Although my approach is not “ethnographic” in the traditional sense, my awareness of the original Soulja Boy video and its variations was informed by ethnographic-style conversations and hanging out with my son and his friends (third-graders at the time), side-by-side YouTube surfing with them, and by the occasional visits to their school and classroom as a Mother. In this privileged role, I have had a view of kid life and concerns that may be less available to either a classroom teacher or a traditional ethnographer. Through these kids, I also began to see the generally influential role of YouTube on their communicative repertoires, listening in as many YouTube phrases became important calling cards in that social circle. Even a cursory familiarity with YouTube and its fans reveals that individuals in the same social groupings tend to have sets of YouTube favorites that are largely overlapping. YouTube, while never explicitly designed to be such, has evolved to become a site of participatory culture (cf., Burgess and Green 2009) that often converges with face-to-face interaction.2 For this reason, YouTube can be an ideal context to study social connections that otherwise remain largely invisible, particularly the combination and recombination of repertoire elements that create meaningful performative acts. This article begins to illustrate how we might usefully engage with this medium to learn generally about social and communicative processes and, more specifically, how youth use widely circulating media iconography to engage with each other and the (digital) world.


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The Crank Dat Soulja Boy Story In January 2006, DeAndre Cortez Way, age 15 (soon to become known as Soulja Boy), opened a YouTube account and started posting song and dance videos he made in his father’s home in Batesville, Mississippi (pop. 8,000). A little over a year later (March 2007), his song, “Crank Dat” was on mainstream radio, and in another month, Michael Crooms, also known as Mr. Collipark of Collipark Music (an imprint of Interscope), met with Soulja Boy and gave him a recording contract. In the official YouTube video version of the song and dance that resulted, Mr. Collipark himself is depicted as a latecomer to the massive success of Soulja Boy, who initially vaulted himself to fame via viral Internet-based mechanisms. In this self-designated “official” video, Mr. Collipark is shown using the same online mechanisms to sign Soulja Boy that kids around the country had been using to access Soulja Boy’s music for months.3 From its humble beginnings in Batesville, Mississippi, this song was catapulted, largely via YouTube and MySpace to massive commercial success. As such, it easily falls into the category of marketized hip-hop sellout. Thanks to YouTube and downloadable Ring Tones, this song could be scapegoated as the pinnacle of “monolithic homogenized consumer taste” (Barber 2008:290). But the life of “Crank Dat Soulja Boy” extends far beyond this official version. The same vehicles that enable this song and dance to be massively distributed have also allowed it to be massively reembedded in new and varied communicative repertoires. There are far more YouTube video recontextualizations of “Crank Dat” than there are Soulja Boy hits. And, because of his original use of YouTube and MySpace, Soulja Boy has been able to get his “message” recontextualized in social networks far beyond his partying peers in Batesville, Mississippi, or Mr. Collipark’s media domain. The Variations If you look up “Crank Dat” on YouTube, you will immediately be drawn to hundreds more videos posted that recontextualize Soulja Boy’s hit in widely varied ways. Obvious features distinguish these variations from one another and are listed in Table 1. The music and beat, the lyrics, the huge, colorful clothes, the bling, being phenotypically black, being male, even being live (as opposed to animated) are all features of the original song that are played with or left out of the variations. As we go down the list of recontextualizations on the left of Table 1, features of the original drop away.

Table 1. Distinctive Features Occurring in Soulja Boy Variations Variations

“Official Web Site” version Three White Boys “original” Black Girls Version Blonde U of E Cheerleaders MIT Dancers Crank Dat Folger Boy Crank Dat Harry Potter SpongeBob Bambi Cap’n Crunch Cereal Third Graders In Class

Distinctive Features Music

Dance Moves

Live Action

Lyrics

Black

Male

Appurtenances

+ + + + + + + + + +

+ + + + + + + +

+ + + + + + +

+ + + + +

+

+ +

+ +

+ +

+ + +

+

+

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Obviously, the goal of these variations is not simply to emulate the original. Rather, semiotic elements of the Soulja Boy performance become recontextualized in the new video variation. Additional elements become incorporated, many of which may also be widely circulated elements. In this sense, all of the variations illustrate how different individuals use disparate hybrid combinations of repertoire elements to create a meaningful and unique performance. As elements of the original drop away, elements of the creator’s communicative repertoire become more important to the overall performance. To exemplify this point, at the middle of the list, we have Folja Boy: The name itself encapsulates punny hybridity—Folgers Coffee plus Soulja Boy is uniquely absurd. The video is also pervasively hybrid and absurdly hilarious. It preserves the music track, the live action element, and the dance moves, and the performer is black. But the lyrics (very raunchy in the original), while still rhythmically intact, have taken on funny, coffeeoriented content. For example, the line in the original video hit, “You gotta punch then crank back three times from left to right,” becomes “you just gotta make a cup and take three sips.” The infamous line, “superman da ho” (which I suggest readers google if not familiar with the use of “superman” as a verb), becomes a slightly more innocent “coffeebean da ho.” The arguably exhibitionist “wat me crank it wat me ro” of the original is now replaced with “wat me drink it, wat me po.”4 Compared to others on the list, Folja Boy is relatively unknown. On my latest check back, it only had 23,754 views (compared to over 67 million views of the “official” video) and the third graders who initially told me about Soulja Boy had never heard of it. (Still, the stodgy old Folgers brand might have done well to take note of this burst of recognition provided by creative consumers!) But other variations, even more distinct from the original have far more viewers. As we go down the cline, and resemblance to the original is further bleached away, wildly popular animated parodies take over. Clearly, popularity is not gained through fidelity to the original (or mindless emulation). Rather, as elements of the original depart, new repertoire elements combine with the remaining Soulja Boy features for new kinds of performative effects. The massively popular “Bambi” version also illustrates a hybridity of mass-mediated elements. Although this video preserves Soulja Boy’s lyrics and music, nothing else remains. Bambi voices Soulja Boy’s dramatic opening “YOOOOOOOL!” Owl intones, “Soulja Boy Tellem.” The other lines are also painstakingly lip-synced by Bambi and other forest friends. This video received over one million views before being yanked from YouTube for copyright infringement (Disney images).5 Disney, apparently, entrenched in traditional copyright paranoia, never hopped on the participatory culture bandwagon or recognized the marketing power of creative consumerism. Although this is a unique, highly individual production, its entertainment value depends on viewers who have some familiarity with Bambi, just as the joy of the Folja Boy version depends on some familiarity with Folgers Coffee. Each of these variations depends on a relationship with another widely circulated and mass-produced form, but the combination between two massproduced icons yields the highly creative recontextualization. Further down the list, there are more brand name associations, most notably (for the third graders) the Cap’n Crunch variation, in which different cereal spokes-icons flash on the screen (Cap’n Crunch, of course, but also The Fruit Loops Toucan, Tony the Tiger, “Snap, Crackle, and Pop” from Rice Krispies, and even the kindly old white-haired Quaker oatmeal man). These cereals all get mention in the reworked Soulja Boy lyrics, as in, “Hey what’s up man, I got this new cereal for y’all called Cap’n Crunch.” This version has received far fewer viewings than the Bambi version (only 230,454) but was a huge hit with the suburban Philadelphia third graders.6 This video combines repertoire elements—hip-hop register plus sugary cereal!—for which these kids have massive affinity.

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At the bottom of the resemblance cline, I have listed a barely recognizable version of the dance, containing no additional branded elements, and never posted on YouTube. Instead, this is a version that was periodically performed surreptitiously by third-graders during class. Rather than recombining it into a consumer product repertoire, the boys seamlessly incorporated the Soulja Boy dance into their schoolboy repertoire, occasionally performing a silent version of the dance during “seat work” in school, a time when students were allowed to quietly get up and stand next to their desk and stretch, if needed. This performance of Crank Dat was so muted as to be nearly beyond recognition. The teacher never once saw these mini–Crank Dat dances as disruptive or, the boys speculated, even recognized them as anything other than a sort of idiosyncratic stretching break. The boys’ peers, however, knew what was going on, having fully absorbed the moves into their own unique, third-grade-boys-from-suburban-Philadelphia communicative repertoire. Viewer Response As the massive range of videos that were spawned by the Soulja Boy dance video illustrate, describing the effects of at least this form of mass media as “one-dimensional” seems inaccurate. Viewers have responded not with passive reverence but with videos of their own. Furthermore, the comments posted on YouTube in response to these remakes also illustrate that YouTubers have not become one-dimensional consumers of whatever is posted on the site, but active critics who revolt at the sign of homogeneity of product or opinion. Moreover, fans are not drawn to certain videos by abstract notions of “quality,” but through recognition of the creative recombinations of repertoire elements that appeal to their local sensibilities. As mentioned above, popularity of videos has little to do with fidelity to the original. In general, the further down the cline you go, the more positive the YouTube commentaries are. At the top of the cline, however, people’s remarks about the Official Soulja Boy video are almost universally negative. These comments on the “Official” Soulja Boy video frame this as the “hip hop” genre (gone very very bad) and Soulja Boy as the ultimate talentless sellout: what is this dog sh!t ? No rhymes, no flow, nothing inteligent said. all hes done is talk about himself and his whack dance. Leave the rapping to the big boys and the dancing to Ciara, soulja boy your a fake little biatch playing for the 14 year olds he’s a nonlyrical sellout one hit wonder soulja bitch is majority of the reason hiphop is dying

Obviously, the song’s power is not in its qualities as an artistic whole, but as a widely circulating video with highly recontextualizable features (catchy tune, and easy-toperform dance steps). As I’ve demonstrated, this song has spawned so many imitations that it hardly qualifies as “hip-hop” any more. When the hip-hop elements of the performance are recontextualized in combination with other repertoire elements, however, comments become much more favorable. Many of the variations, especially those further down the cline of resemblance to the original—Bambi, SpongeBob, Cap’n Crunch—are pronounced “the best YouTube video ever” by online commentators. These favorite variations also indicate the range of communicative repertoires into which elements of the Soulja Boy performance has been absorbed. If you are an older adult who has never gotten into “hip hop” things, but for whom coffee is part of your daily round, and if you remember “Folgers” in your house growing up, you might find “Folja Boy” particularly good. It is also a favorite, apparently, of workers at the Folgers factory. One YouTube commenter on Folja Boy writes:

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hahaha! I’m at the folger’s coffee factory in Kansas City. Some of the employees have stumbled on this video and they find it hilarious, including me! Keep on representin that Folgers!

The phrase “Keep on representin that Folgers!” combining hip-hop diction and the stodgy Folgers brand, encapsulates the hybridity of the video itself—the incongruous lifestyle combination of hip-hop dress and dance with the drinking of a morning cup of Folgers coffee. So, Soulja Boy references become part of a more enduring and locally communicative repertoire for “some of the employees” at the Folgers factory through the recombination of that widely circulating dance with Folgers coffee. Although Folja Boy had direct appeal to Folgers factory workers, other hybrid combinations of widely circulating mass-mediated cultural emblems have more appeal for different social groupings. The third grade boys, connoisseurs of both sugary cereals and their brand icons, chose Crank Dat Cap’n Crunch as their favorite. The third graders enjoyed recognizing sugary cereals and their animated spokespersons represented. The online comments about this clip echo the boys’ appreciation and ooze admiration for this video and the artistry—even “genius”—of its creator, Markarel: Greatest parody song ever. Markarel is a genius I met him in St. Louis last summer, overall good dude.

Just like the comment about Folja Boy, in remarking on the video, this comment contains disparate hybrid combinations using more heady words like “parody” and “genius” in combination with the more street ready, “overall good dude.” As these examples indicate, as elements of the original Soulja Boy performance drift away, other widely circulating repertoire elements enter into the subsequent recontextualizations. Although Folja Boy and Crank Dat Cap’n Crunch have few of the distinctive features of the original “Crank Dat, Soulja Boy” performance, they have replaced the elements that have been dropped along the way with a new array of repertoire elements relevant to their own cultural projects or peer groups. Mass Media and Individual Communicative Repertoires Soulja Boy’s song and dance and its viral distribution through YouTube and social networking sites illustrates that, counter Marcuse, mass media are not a homogenizing, deadening force. Instead, they are a way that highly localized recontextualizations spread exponentially. Today, through e-mail, social networking sites, YouTube, and the Internet in general, a range of semiotic partials is available for incorporation into individual communicative repertoires. Even a highly consistent mass-mediated message has a range of distinctive features that will be recontextualized with other repertoire elements in massively diverse social formations. The result is a huge fan base, but not a homogenous one. Some might argue that these recontextualizations, while not homogenous, are perhaps a bit deadening, or at least content challenged. Perhaps. However, despite the purely entertainment-oriented nature of this Soulja Boy example, this phenomenon is not trivial. In fact, another individual was recently catapulted to the presidency of the United States thanks, in large part, to this same newfangled, mass-mediated but highly localized process. The “Yes We Can” Story Just about the same time Soulja Boy was signed to Interscope Records, Barack Obama was beginning his own meteoric rise to the top. This rise can at least in part be attributed to the same processes that propelled Soulja Boy’s fame: viral dissemination of a consistent

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message, distinctive repertoire elements locally selected for, leading to massive uptake of diverse elements of a message. On January 8, 2008, shortly after his victory in the Iowa presidential primary, Obama lost in New Hampshire. Despite his loss that day, he captured the mass media with his “Yes We Can” oratory, which was subsequently transformed into a music video by will.i.am (of Black Eyed Peas)7 and recontextulized in massively varied repertoires. Like Soulja Boy, the Obama Campaign, with the help of YouTube and social networking sites, was able to get Obama’s “message” recontextualized in a fantastic diversity of new communicative contexts, the wide-ranging specificity of which could never have been predicted by the crafters of Obama’s original rhetoric.

The Variations In Table 2, I’ve listed as distinctive features those causes denoted by the content of Obama’s original “Yes We Can” speech—accomplishments that YES WE CAN do. In the original speech, he does mention that we can heal this nation, repair this world, go to the mountaintop (as Martin Luther King did), save our planet, restore opportunity, give women rights, go to the moon, organize workers, and bring troops home from Iraq. Proceeding down the left-hand column listing variations, there emerge more and more divergent versions of the original. Just as the Soulja Boy recontextualizers select from and omit various distinctive features of the original “Crank Dat,” creators of the different versions of the “Yes We Can” video select from the wide array of causes enumerated in Obama’s original “Yes We Can” speech. Just following the will.i.am video is Maria Muldaur’s version. The music and most of the lyrics for this one are taken from the 1970s Pointer Sisters hit “Yes We Can Can” and, unlike the will.i.am version, are not directly dubbed from Obama’s speech. Nevertheless, this version includes almost all of the causes mentioned in Obama’s original speech and she throws in the “sí se puede” reference (made explicit in the will.i.am version) with an image of César Chávez. Certainly the Pointer Sisters’ allusion and Maria Muldaur’s own artistic legacy as a folk singer–songwriter appeals to an older demographic than will.i.am’s song, which derives from his location in the youth pop world and his heritage as a member of the pop band Black Eyed Peas. Perhaps because of the specificity of the social domain to which Maria Muldaur appeals, Maria Muldaur’s “Yes We Can” (although highly produced and professionally arrayed) received only 56,000 or so hits, and quite a few harsh comments.8 Videos featuring young people, however, no matter what the video’s production values, often become very popular. Farther down the list, for example, we come to “Barackapella,” featuring talented yet scruffy looking a cappella singers (all white) from an Oregon college. This version stays very true to Obama’s New Hampshire speech. But it also omits mention of many of the causes enumerated by Obama. Still, despite its amateur production values and general simplicity, this clip has received over 400,000 hits and rave reviews.9 The subsequent variations listed in Table 2 continue to decrease in resemblance to Obama’s original speech. The final three on the cline bare least resemblance to the original, and, especially in the case of the legalization ad, seem more about something else. These new versions embed the “yes we can” message into new repertoires that diverge widely from the content and the iconography of Obama’s original speech: Sí Se Puede (Spanish for “Yes We Can” and the signature slogan for César Chávez grape boycott) was never part of Obama’s original. Nor were Legalizing Marijuana or Supporting Gay marriage. Yet, just as Soulja Boy’s lyric became part of repertoires that included Fruit Loops

Repair This World + + + + + + +

YES WE CAN/Sí se puede

+/+ + + + + + + +

Images of MLK, but no articulation of “the mountaintop.”

a

Original speech will.i.am original video Maria Muldaur Pointer Sisters mix International multilingual version Barackapella Yes We Can Can (Pointer Sisters mix) No We Can’t (McCain) Pro medical marijuana ad Yes We Can (Bob the Builder)

Variation

+ + + + + +

Heal This Nation + + +a + +

Go to the Mountaintop like MLK + + + +

Give Women Rights + + + +

Restore Opportunity

Distinctive Feature/Cause

Table 2. Distinctive Features Occurring in Yes We Can Variations

+

+

Save Our Planet

+

Go to the Moon

+

Organize Workers

+

Bring the Troops Home

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and Folgers Coffee, Obama’s Yes We Can message joins forces with wide-ranging repertoire elements—drug legalization, gay marriage, Bob the Builder—in subsequent recontextualizations. In the drug legalization video, for example, the “Yes We Can” phrase has been recontextualized in a completely new speech event, accomplishing an entirely different form of social action—an award-winning marijuana legalization ad campaign. This YouTube video also became very popular—receiving over 450,000 hits.10 This legalization issue, although never present in the New Hampshire Speech, was also incorporated into the McCain criticism “No You Can’t” video, retrospectively making it seem as though Obama included “yes we can legalize medical marijuana” in his original New Hampshire speech, which he did not. This video also negated gay marriage, implying Obama had said “Yes you can get married if you are gay”—which, at that point, Obama had never said or advocated. This video illustrates how the layering of semiotic features of new social projects and communities gets continually more complex with further distance from the original: “No You Can’t!” is both a parody of will.i.am’s original video and a critique of McCain’s negativity. Although it may somewhat inconveniently (for Obama) invoke causes implying that Obama endorsed them, it simultaneously, in its critique of McCain, does useful dirty work (negative campaigning) for Obama.11 This received nearly two million views. The last recontextualization on the list makes the obvious connection between Obama’s “Yes We Can” and the identical Bob the Builder Slogan. This is, perhaps the most negative recontextualization of Obama’s message. It is also the variation that retains almost no distinctive features of the original. Simply the three words, “yes we can,” with the superimposition of Obama’s image now and then.12 Just like the Soulja Boy variations, these variations take up the original with massively diverse creativity. The recontextualizations are not simply mindless (or One-Dimensional) imitations of the original: There are no videos of people trying to copy, exactly, Obama’s speech and his delivery. Each of these is an active response to the original message, yet each depends on the original message for its content to matter. Moreover, each message further disseminates the original message, reembedding it in new social domains. In this way, Obama was able not only to spread his message but also to reembed it in the communicative repertoires of groups—gay marriage supporters, drug-legalization types—he never explicitly supports. In this way, his message was perfect, not for its content, but because it was easily recontextualizable in the communicative repertoires of subgroups who may otherwise have been less attracted to him: young people, for example, or gay men, or those who want to legalize marijuana. Conclusion and Implications I have described a process for understanding the effects of a mass-mediated message. Even the most widely circulated (viral) mass-mediated message is not one that is repeated identically by mindless drones. Rather, these examples have illustrated how, by rethinking the micro–macro dichotomy in terms of recontextualization and repertoire, we are able to trace empirical pathways through which semiotic forms gain differential functional value as they are embedded in new communicative repertoires. The process goes like this: A video circulates on YouTube. Individuals remake that video—not replicating it, but highlighting certain semiotic elements by recontextualizing them in a new semiotic array. In this new hybrid combination, the individual makes a bid at recognition by like-minded peers. In this way, the individual is using the recontextualized bit as a new element of his already established communicative repertoire. This is a process that also occurs without YouTube. Imagine a sixth-grade peer group. They always greet and take leave in certain ways (Yo, what’s up? Let’s roll!), they wear

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similar clothing (big shorts and T-shirts), and share certain hobbies (skateboards and comics), food tastes (energy drinks), and ideologies (they belong to green club, recycle, and would never litter). These are relatively stable elements of this peer-group repertoire. But there are always elements entering into it and being subtracted. One day, someone hears the word “snap!”—maybe on a TV show, maybe in a commercial, a song, or a conversation his big brother was having. Who knows? But he remembers it and he wants to use it. He could try it once, while hanging out, realizing he’s running late and needs to leave immediately: “Snap! Let’s roll!”). His friends get it. He has recontextualized this word. But is that word now part of his communicative repertoire? This depends on if it is functional and recognizable. Do his friends recognize it and show its legitimacy by using it themselves? Does it fill a communicative niche? Soon all the group uses “snap.” Snap! I forgot my lunch. Snap! My mom’s here! Gradually they get what it means—in their group. Snap! Across multiple interactions, embedded in a shared semiotic array, “snap!” becomes a functional repertoire element—not simply a word from somewhere else that is momentarily recontextualized in these kids’ talk. The value of “snap” in this peer group draws on both widely circulated mass media cache as well as its local functionality. Obviously, this process—recontextualization and incorporation into local communicative repertoires—occurs without YouTube, but YouTube is a remarkable medium because it makes this process visible to the analyst. Just as a photographer’s developing fluid suddenly reveals a previously invisible image in the darkroom, the medium of YouTube reveals and accelerates (and extends globally) social processes that have, until now, been largely invisible to us as discourse analysts worried about micro and macro. YouTube’s original design was highly underdetermined. YouTube’s current organization, as a site that features exponentially compounding response videos, bloomed from the way many users pushed the site, through their own practices on the site, to be a medium for social interaction and sharing (Burgess and Green 2009). Because YouTube evolved in this way into a site of chained response videos, it reveals even more clearly the continual recontextualization of semiotic elements in local repertoires: An Obama video is posted and the phrase “Yes we can” begins to circulate. Just like “snap,” people hear it, and, begin to use it in their own peer-recognizable ways, for their own agendas, and to post video responses. Unlike “snap,” we can watch this process unfold through YouTube. “Yes we can” comes to function differently to different people, easily recontextualized in an enormous range of repertoires, and incorporated into those repertoires through repeated viewing, commenting, and recirculation. Similarly, Soulja Boy: His song and dance circulates on YouTube, people find it, share it with their friends, recontextualize it in their own repertoire—MIT scientists in lab coats, Folgers factory workers, cereal lovers. It is now an element of a repertoire that may be highly differentiated from the original source. In both of these cases, a single message gets disseminated widely, interest groups and peer groups select distinctive features of that message and recontextualize them within their own repertoire, leading to massive uptake of diverse elements of a message. All traceable via YouTube. Widely circulating media are always resources for locally functional individual communicative repertoires. Across the world, people don New York Yankees hats just as they have seen hip-hop artists do in videos that circulate, often through YouTube, even to the most remote Internet cafes. Similarly, across the United States, countless 12-year-olds say “snap!” or have hair that looks uncannily Justin Bieber–like. Even the ways people walk or gesture or punctuate their speech (snap!) often emerge from widely circulated popular sources. Features like these are much more unconsciously incorporated into an individual’s communicative repertoire than explicit references to “Justin Bieber” or “Jay-Z,” but they can be as effective at selecting a group of people who share common ground (and excluding others who may not).

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Because of digital media, semiotic forms circulate much more widely and rapidly than ever. But thanks to digital media, we also have new ways of exploring how widely circulating forms are incorporated into local repertoires. I have illustrated how massmediated repertoire elements recirculate and combine in ways that potentially foster not homogenization, but more diverse forms of recognition globally. Individuals never produce exact replicas of popular cultural performances but, rather, hybrid forms compiled of diversely recognizable repertoire elements. Thus, common ground with respect to mass-mediated culture is not found through homogenization, but through new combinations that potentially foster repertoire overlap. Rather than homogenous, today’s classrooms and many urban spaces (Anderson 2011) are probably more heterogeneous than they have ever been. How do we understand interaction in these heterogeneous contexts? Invoking either macrogeneralizations about how certain groups of people communicate or microlevel generalizations about how interactions work is likely to be misleading. However, examining how these students and their teachers use hybrid combinations of widely circulating media elements may help us analyze communication in even the most heterogeneous contexts. I have proposed a methodology for analyzing how widely circulating media elements become part of individuals’ communicative repertoires. In schools, looking at how students and their teachers draw on mass-mediated semiotic forms in their daily interaction makes it clear that communication involves a huge range of resources, a prime font of which is the Internet and digital media. Exploring these repertoire sources and possibilities for overlap across massively diverse individuals provides a way of understanding difference—as well as how to bridge differences—in and out of classrooms.

Betsy Rymes is Associate Professor of Educational Linguistics in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania ([email protected]).

Notes Acknowledgments. Immense thanks to the comments of three anonymous reviewers, to Stanton Wortham for his ongoing feedback and for the invitation to explore this theme, and to Nancy Hornberger for her continuous flow of encouragement and enthusiasm. Thank you also to Alessandro Duranti for inviting me to present a preliminary version of this article as part of the Center for Language Interaction and Culture speaker series at UCLA, and to Elinor Ochs, Steve Clayman, and John Heritage for their insights into the role of digital media and repetition on communication. There are always flaws remaining—all my responsibility. 1. Although “macro” approaches appear to rely more on essentializing generalizations about demographic groupings, such generalizations are also implicitly part of strictly microapproaches like conversation analysis, because, inevitably, analysts draw on assumptions (based on their own cultural knowledge) to make sense of any turn-by-turn interaction and account for patterns. It is precisely for this reason that Conversation Analysts recommend “conversation analysis” only be conducted by “native speakers.” 2. James Gee (2007) has documented similar positive forms of participatory culture that emerge from playing video games with names like “World of Warcraft,” “Dark Forces of Evil and Cruelty,” or “Endless Doom.” 3. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UFIYGkROII, accessed January 30, 2010. 4. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8_lw3gxOV4&feature=related, accessed January 30, 2010. 5. The original Bambi version (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdi48oUdZP0) has now been removed from YouTube, but when accessed on November 15, 2008, it had received over one million hits. A pirated copy of this is still on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=D6MUEJtTpLM, accessed February 1, 2010). Most commentary on this version is about what a bad copy it is and how it’s not right to steal other videos.

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6. See the YouTube Cap’n Crunch version at this address http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=gLpncqTpRAE, retrieved February 14, 2010. 7. Access the will.i.am song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY, accessed February 17, 2010. 8. To access Muldaur’s “Yes We Can” recontextualization on YouTube, go to http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=ZLVXxGMG3Fw, accessed February 17, 2010. 9. To access Barackapella’s recontextualization of “Yes We Can” on YouTube, go to http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=l07COcgwmXU, accessed February 17, 2010. 10. To access the drug legalization recontextualization of “Yes We Can” on YouTube, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0mEDE_w1xo&feature=related, accessed April 4, 2012. 11. To access “No You Can’t!” go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUKINg8DCUo, accessed February 17, 2010. 12. To access the Bob the Builder recontextualization of “Yes We Can” on YouTube, go to http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNXytgKiAHQ, accessed Februay 17, 2010.

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